True Food: Why Do We Have to Eat?

Why did God create human beings who must keep eating, drinking, breathing, and sleeping?

The True Food series begins in Eden, where food is first received as a gift and dependence exists before anything goes wrong. Genesis gives us dust, breath, body, food, obedience, rebellion, death—and life. Humanity takes what God withheld, loses access to the tree of life, and discovers that bread can sustain mortal life without defeating death.

This first teaching follows the biblical food story from creation and gift to exile and hunger. It leaves us with the question Scripture will answer slowly: How will God restore humanity to life?

Scripture in this episode

Genesis 1:11–12, 26–31; Genesis 2:7–17; Genesis 3:1–24; Deuteronomy 8:3; John 6:35.

In this teaching

• Dependence before sin
• Food as gift rather than possession
• The two trees in Eden
• Receiving what God gives and taking what God withholds
• Bread, mortality, and the limits of physical food
• Why the biblical food story must eventually confront death
• The next great classroom: manna in the wilderness

Find the Way — Meet Rabbi Jesus.

Walk the Way — Modern Mind, Ancient Book.

Transcript

Presented by Modern Mind, Ancient Book where we're going back
to move forward. We're finding a love for the law,
the prophets, and the writings so that we can know
Jesus more.
This is a special episode.
It's called True Food.
And this is episode one.
Every few hours, your body tells you that you're hungry.
It tells you that you're running out.
It tells you to eat a little later,
drink, eventually sleep.
And every few seconds, breathe again.
Then do it all over.
We live as though life belongs to us.
My life, my body, my time, my future.
But your body tells a different story.
Your life has to be continually supplied.
Stop breathing, you die.
Stop drinking, you die.
Stop eating, you die.
We are alive, but we are not self -sustaining.
And that raises a strange question.
Why would God make human beings that way?
Why create creatures who continually need something outside themselves in
order to keep living?
We usually think of hunger as a problem, but hunger
exists because dependency exists.
And dependency exists before anything went wrong, before sin, before
exile, before death entered the human story, opened the Bible
to the first chapter.
And something remarkable happens almost immediately.
God created humanity, blessed humanity, gave humanity authority within creation.
And then he says, I have given you food before
Adam plants a field.
God feeds him. Before humanity produces, humanity received sustenance.
And that is the first lesson of the entire biblical
story of food.
Creaturely life is received life.
The first food was a gift.
Genesis begins with God creating a world that human beings
did not make. Light, land, plants, fruit, humanity.
That all existed, but humanity arose late in that story.
We enter a world already prepared for us.
And when God speaks about food in Genesis 1, he
speaks as the giver.
Seed -bearing plants, fruit -bearing trees given for food.
That order matters. We often think, I work, therefore I
eat. And there is truth in that.
Work matters.
Agriculture matters. Humanity's responsibility matters.
But Genesis reaches beneath all of those things.
Before there is human agriculture, there is divine provision.
The human being can cultivate the earth, but the human
being cannot create an earth from nothing.
We can plant. We cannot command reality to exist.
We can harvest. We cannot create the fundamental possibility of
fruit. We enter a creation that was here before us.
We receive.
Then we work with what we have received.
And the ancient book begins challenging the modern mind immediately
because modern life can make us feel self -sufficient.
Money appears in an account because we worked.
Food appears in a refrigerator because we bought it.
Water appears because we opened a faucet.
Light appears because we touched a switch.
The chain of provision becomes so long and technologically sophisticated
that we can stop seeing the source altogether.
Genesis strips everything back.
Before the grocery store, the farm, the rain, the soil,
the seed, there was God.
And humanity stands inside God's world receiving life.
This distinction is essential.
Humans needed food before the fall.
That means dependence itself is not punishment.
Adam did not become dependent because he sinned.
He was created dependent on God.
That tells us something profound about being human.
All of our sustenance, all of our existence comes from
God.
God did not design us to be little self -contained
gods.
Creatures received. God gave.
That relationship is good.
The trees needed soil.
The animals needed food.
The human beings needed food and water.
And Genesis 2 gives us something even more intimate.
God forms the humans from dust.
Then God breathed life into dust and breath.
The human being is earthy, embodied in physical, and alive
because God gave us life.
That is biblical anthropology, the study of man, at its
most basic. It's just a fact.
We are not divine beings temporarily trapped inside physical bodies.
We are creatures formed and given life, placed in a
world that God made, and we are made in his
image.
And we're invited to receive our sustenance from the world
that God gave us.
That should change the way we think about our dependency.
Needing God is not evidence that something's gone wrong.
Thinking we do not need God is where something has
gone terribly wrong.
Genesis 2 gives us another picture.
God planted the garden, the trees grew, and they were
beautiful. And they were good for food.
A river, it watered that garden, fresh, clean water.
Then God placed those humans there.
And notice the order again.
The man does not arrive in a wasteland and construct
Eden. God prepared, then he placed.
The human was given meaningful work.
He was to serve and keep that garden.
Biblical dependence, it's not laziness.
Adam received, and then Adam worked.
He worked with what he received.
God's provision and human responsibility, they're not enemies, they belong
together. But the source, while that remains clear, the garden
was God's before it was Adam's workplace.
The trees existed because God caused them to grow.
The water flowed to a world God created.
Adam's work was important.
But Adam was never the ultimate explanation for his own
life. And then in the middle of the garden, filled
with food, Genesis points to two particular trees.
One becomes famous.
The other may be even more important for the story
we are telling.
Genesis names the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil and the tree of life.
We tend to spend most all of our attention on
the forbidden tree.
Understandably, it's what brought suffering.
That's where the rebellion happened.
But true food requires us to notice the other tree
too. Because by the end of Genesis 3, scripture will
tell us something extraordinary about it.
Eating from the tree of life is associated with forever
living.
Now be careful. Genesis does not give us a scientific
explanation for how that works.
We do not know what the fruit looked like, nor
its chemistry. We are told to imagine that
it was there. It's not some hidden biological compound that
creates immortality.
The text's concern is theological,
not scientific.
There's something in God's garden associated with continued life.
And humanity had access to it until we decided to
be rebellious.
Think about how human rebellion occurs in Genesis.
It occurs through eating.
God had given enormous freedom.
You can eat. The garden was full of provision, but
there was just one boundary.
One tree from which humanity was not to eat.
But the serpent spoke, and the woman saw, and the
fruit appeared desirable. And the humans, well, they did something
incredibly simple. They took and ate.
We often treat the eating as though it was almost
incidental. It's not. Eating expresses the decision.
God had established what could be received.
Humanity decided to determine for itself what should be taken.
There's an enormous difference between receiving and taking.
Creaturely life was designed around receiving God's good provision within
God's instruction.
Human rebellion reaches out and says, I will determine good
for myself. I will take what I desire.
That's not just about fruit.
It's about trust.
Whose wisdom defines life?
God's, or ours?.
And the human beings ate.
Now notice what happens near the end of Genesis 3.
Humanity had already taken and eaten.
Then God speaks about another possibility.
What if the human reaches out again, takes and eats?
From the tree of life, and he lives forever, do
you see the symmetry?
First, take and eat what God prohibited.
Then, prevent humanity from taking and eating what God gives,
continuing life.
Two eating scenes. One human action has consequences for the
other.
Human beings took the food they were told not to
take, and now they lose or lost access to the
tree from which they might have eaten and lived forever.
The crisis had become larger than disobedience.
It now had become mortality.
And Genesis ends the garden story with a haunting image.
Humanity outside of the garden.
The tree inside of the garden.
And that way, guarded.
That image should stay with you, and it will stay
with us for the entire series.
Because the Bible has hundreds of chapters left.
But the question has already been created.
How does humanity ever get back to life?
Human beings still eat after Eden.
God doesn't stop providing.
But our relationship with food changes as the ground becomes
difficult. Thorns and thistles and painful labor.
Sweat.
And Genesis says Adam will eat bread by the sweat
of his face until he returns to the ground.
That sentence contains almost the entire problem of mortal existence.
Eat bread. Work.
Survive.
Keep eating.
Keep working.
And eventually,
you die.
Bread helps Adam live.
But bread cannot keep Adam from dying.
That's an important thing to say.
I'm going to say it again.
Bread sustains mortal life.
But bread cannot make mortal life immortal.
Genesis does not phrase the theological conclusion exactly that way.
But the narrative places bread and mortality beside one another.
You will eat, and you will return to dust.
Food postpones the return.
It cannot abolish it.
And suddenly, the ordinary experience we begin with becomes theological.
Why do I have to eat again?
Because yesterday's food cannot keep me alive forever.
Why will I have to eat tomorrow?
Because tomorrow's food will not be enough.
Meal after meal, year after year, generation after generation.
We eat to continue a life that remains mortal.
Food is good.
It's not God. We need this distinction from the beginning
of the entire True Food project.
So it doesn't go wrong.
The Bible doesn't teach us to despise food.
Food is God's idea.
Bodies are God's idea.
Creation is God's work.
The problem isn't physical existence.
The problem comes when the gift is mistaken for the
source. Food is good.
But food is not God.
Water is good. But water isn't God.
Creation carries God's provision.
It's a gift for you.
All these things.
Creation does not explain itself.
Psalm 104 will later describe creatures looking to God for
food. God gives. They gather.
God opens his hands.
They are filled in regard to the animals.
Then the Psalm speaks out about breath.
When breath is withdrawn, creatures die and return to dust.
Food, breath, life, it's all received from God.
That's the biblical worldview.
Human beings are not autonomous biological machines possessing life as
independent property.
We live because life is continually given within a creation
upheld by God.
This is where the ancient worldview begins pressing against ours.
We understand more about the mechanisms of nourishment than an
ancient Israelite did. We can describe metabolism, oxygen exchange, calories,
proteins, fats, carbohydrates, micronutrients, blood chemistry, cellular respiration.
And that knowledge is good.
But explanation of mechanism does not answer the deepest question.
Knowing how food sustains biological life does not tell us
why there is matter and energy and life and consciousness
and soil and water and plants and animals or humans
in the first place.
The ancient book asks a more fundamental question.
Who is the giver?
And then a second,
can the gifts themselves finally save you from death?
Genesis answers to the second question appears to be, nope.
Humanity can eat outside Eden, but humanity still dies outside
Eden. So the biblical story needs something greater.
It needs something greater than an improved agricultural system.
The problem is deeper than scarcity.
Humanity has lost access to life.
We need scripture's own categories.
The human problem is not that we have fallen to
a lower frequency of existence and need to climb to
a higher energy level.
Genesis gives us far more concrete language.
Dust, breath, body, food, obedience, rebellion, death,
then life.
Later scripture will give us mortality,
immortality, corruption,
incorruption,
flesh,
spirit,
resurrection,
this odd age or time period and the time to
come.
And those are our categories because God's promise is going
to become far greater than you will feel spiritually elevated.
The biblical promise will eventually become the dead will rise.
True food must be large enough to deal with a
grave.
We often describe Eden primarily in terms of location.
It's paradise lost, a beautiful garden.
But look deeper, what made Eden Eden?
Was it merely nice weather, abundant fruit, a perfect environment?
No. The great loss is not simply humans lost a
place to live, a nice place to live.
The great loss is presence.
God was there.
Humanity lived within God's ordered world.
They received God's provision and God's presence.
Rebellion fractured that relationship.
Humanity was sent out, the tree remained, the way was
guarded. This means that the food story is already becoming
a presence story. We will not fully understand that until
the end of the series.
For now, simply remember, humanity lost more than a garden.
Something now stands between humans and the tree of life.
So by Genesis 3, we already have the fundamental pieces
of true food. God created life.
God gave food. Humanity received that food and that life.
And then humanity rebelled through taking and eating that which
was not ours to eat.
Human beings lost access to the tree of life.
Food became tied to difficulty.
Human beings continue to eat and human beings continue to
die.
The rest of scripture now inherits a question.
Not merely how will God feed people, God will do
that repeatedly. The deeper question is, how will God restore
humanity to life?
And this is why we cannot begin true food with
Jesus' word in John 6.
If we begin there, we hear, I am the bread
of life, as a nice religious metaphor.
But once Genesis has asked the question properly, the claim
becomes enormous.
Because humanity does not merely need inspiration.
Humanity does not merely need another loaf.
Humanity has been barred from the tree of life.
We need God to solve death.
And now we deliberately resist the temptation to rush to
Jesus. We know where the story is going.
But the ancient people living inside the biblical story did
not have John 6 yet.
They had Genesis and they had exile from Eden, they
had hunger, they had death.
Let the problem remain unresolved because God is going to
teach humanity slowly. Through famine, through provision, through bread, through
water, in the wilderness and through manna, through prophets, through
hunger itself. Before Jesus ever says, I am the bread
of life, God will spend generations teaching Israel what bread
can and cannot do.
So return to Eden one final time.
Humanity stands outside. They can still eat.
They will grow grain.
They will bake bread.
They will raise their children.
They will build cities.
They will cultivate fields.
Human civilization will continue.
Food, it will continue.
But behind them is something they cannot reach.
And that is the tree of life.
And between humanity and that tree, there is a guarded
way. And that is where we should leave teaching one.
Not with an answer, but with hunger.
Because humanity can still eat, but humanity cannot eat its
way out of death.
We can drink, but no ordinary water will make us
live forever. We can work, build, harvest, cook, store, survive,
at least for a while.
Then we return to dust.
Death claims all of us.
So from this point forward, watch what God does.
Watch whenever someone becomes hungry.
Watch whenever water disappears.
Watch famine arrive. Watch whenever God supplies bread, because the
Bible is going to keep putting food in front of
dying people. And slowly, very slowly, God is going to
teach them where life actually comes from.
The next great classroom will be in the wilderness.
Israel won't have crops or stores or an ordinary way
to feed itself.
God will let them become hungry.
Then bread will appear from heaven.
What is it?
And later, Moses will explain why.
God was teaching them something.
Something humanity had forgotten since Eden.
Man does not live by bread alone.
Next, why did God give Israel manna?
Find the Way — Meet Rabbi Jesus.
Walk the Way — Modern Mind, Ancient Book.